My 2024 Top-10 Book Review

To help set the context for this year’s book review, let me take you back some 30+ years to 1992. There are two seemingly unrelated incidents from that year that I would like to highlight.

One evening that February, my German teacher at Princeton, Mrs. Diana Crane, spent an entire one-hour session explaining the word Wahr to me. I knew the meaning, per se, from the German class I had taken with Frau Mellis in Varanasi a decade earlier, but I hadn’t realized its significance. While Wahr has some overlap with the English word true, it doesn’t merely mean factual correctness (which can be conveyed with richtig). Rather, it implies Truth in a more universal, fundamental sense – something irrefutable, something authentic.

Second, I became a naturalized US citizen in April of 1992. Election season was in full swing, and I was to vote for the first time in my newly adopted country. I watched Ross Perot announce his candidacy on Larry King Live—not a news conference, not a press release, but at a talk show with nearly twelve million viewers that night. That was fascinating for me. I also watched all three of the Bush-Clinton-Perot debates live and experienced that pivotal “how has the national debt affected you personally” moment in the second debate. More importantly, I began to appreciate how narratives were created and were (made to) gain momentum.

Why are these two incidents so vivid in my mind? Why are they even related? That same year, I was introduced to Kathleen Jamieson at UPenn’s Annenberg School of Communication. I was at a dinner event and was seated next to Ruzena Bajcsy. She and I were discussing AI-based pattern recognition in medical imaging. Kathleen Jamieson was at the same table as us and probed if such AI systems could be used for fact checking in news media. While the creation of factcheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center was still ten years away, that conversation with Jamieson helped me put that important word Wahr in the context of political discourse. I started following her work.

That brings me back full circle to 2024. While I was trying to make sense of fact and fiction in the presidential campaign, my older daughter, Pavita, was busy learning Punjabi formally and reading the Guru Granth Sahib, with its treatise on Truth center-stage: Aad Sach, Jugaad Sach. Hai Bhi Sach. Nanak Hosi Bhi Sach. My exchanges with her made me reflect on Wahr’s irrefutability through the passage of time. While the overarching dialog was spiritual in nature, its applicability to the here-and-now issues of our society was not lost on me.

Thus, (the future of) Truth was top of mind for me throughout the year – both in its very abstract, philosophical sense as well in its practical, on-the-ground manifestation. This was not only because of the US presidential election campaign, although it was a frequent trigger for me. Another key contributing factor was the realization that as a society, we are to become increasingly dependent on AI, and for the foreseeable future, “hallucinations” of large language models will frequently generate responses, unintentionally, with false?or misleading information presented as?though they were facts. Conversely, algorithms that perpetuate a false narrative or a bias by design will become more and more adept at masquerading as the final word. Following my daughter Gunita’s work at RCFP provided me an occasional respite, but I kept coming back to the following question: will the common person be able to consume what they hear, read, or watch and triangulate from there to facts, to reality, to Truth??

I posed this question to?Tom Friedman?during a breakfast meeting early in the year. While he shared my concerns, his outlook was optimistic. He is of the belief that the societal systems will rewire themselves organically to cope with the veracity deficit. A few months later, I had the opportunity to participate in the World Government Summit. We brought together nine Nobel Laureates to discuss this very issue from a governance perspective. I got to spend a considerable amount of time with?Roger Kornberg?and his family. While they were extremely concerned about the right-leaning tendencies across nations, they had a unique perspective on the resilience of governance systems. While on the one hand, the complexity that has crept into our governance models over the past five decades—both organically and by design—makes our systems slow to react, it also renders them robust and resilient. Further, because the governments across the world are at different stages of maturity and because there is a high degree of economic interdependence between them, we get a natural feedback loop for self-correction.

These themes dominated my thinking and informed much of my reading this year.

In other news, my experiments with silence and mindfulness continue to be a part of my routine. Short of scheduling calendar slots labeled “silence,” I do everything to create quiet time in the morning and during the day. I also go to libraries more often, not to read but to simply sit.

The categories of books in this review are the same as in the past. This is the 30th year of my Top-10.

[Special thanks to my daughter Pavita for her editorial input on this Top-10.]

?Fiction

?1.?????? Carsten Henn. The Door-to-Door Bookstore. Hannover Square Press, 2023.

A few years ago, when my niece left home for college, my 80+-year-old mother felt an unexplained sense of boredom and sadness. She said her friend is now too far away. I tried to laugh it off, but my mother insisted that I didn’t understand the situation. During my next visit to India, I was to get schooled on intergenerational friendships by my mother. Fast forward some years, my niece was writing her essays for graduate school applications. Whom did she decide to write about? Her grandmother, her friend. I was finally able to connect the dots.

These conjoined episodes were heartwarming for me. They reminded me of Tagore’s nineteenth-century short story? Kabuliwala, which I had read in high school. They also stimulated my interest in stories about intergenerational friendships.

Carsten Henn’s The Door-to-Door Bookstore struck a chord in me for this reason.

Originally published in German in 2020 and translated into English in 2023, the story introduces Carl Kollhoff, an elderly book deliveryman with an extraordinary knack for pairing books with the people who need them most. Through his deliveries, which bring books and moments of connection to his customers, Henn crafts a tale that resonates deeply with themes of community, intergenerational friendships, and finding renewed purpose later in life.

Carl's quiet routine takes a turn when Schascha, a spirited and precocious nine-year-old girl joins him on his delivery rounds, infusing his routine with unexpected challenges and surprises. She concludes that Carl is not actually giving his readers what they really need and comes up with her own plan to correct this. Together, they build bridges with and among an eclectic group of customers. As the story progresses, we gradually get acquainted with these readers: an abused wife, an aspiring writer who is paid to read classics to cigar factory workers, a schoolteacher who gets her kicks from spotting typos. We get to feel empathy for them, for their circumstances, and for their evolving characters.

The dialog throughout the novel demonstrates how literature is a catalyst for connection and healing.? Here is an example:

“Good evening, City Gate bookshop. I have a delivery for Mrs. Cremmen.”

“Where do I sign?”

“I need a few words with Mrs. Cremmen about it.”

“She is not at home.”

Silence. Then Schascha piped up. “She is sitting by the window! I can see her. Right there.” She pointed, as if her statement required evidence.

“She is not here. Come back tomorrow.” The man slammed the door.

Effi glanced up, revealing her left cheek, red and swollen.

“Ring the Bell again,” commanded Schascha.

“No,” replied Carl, “it might only make things worse for her.”

“Or better!” Schascha rang the bell. A shout came from inside, then Effi stood up. She opened the door a crack, just the width of the book, showing only the unbruised side of her face. “I am sorry, I am not very well. I can’t.”

“Did the man hit you?” asked Schascha. “No!” exclaimed Effi. “I must get back to him.”?

“Here is your book,” said Carl. “We’ll be back. Stay safe. Here is my number if you want to talk to someone.” He scribbled it quickly on a bookmark and passed it through the crack in the door. Then Effi’s world closed once more.

….

It was no comfort to Carl that Effi had a new book to sustain her. “That wasn’t enough!” said Schascha.?

“You are right. we should think of a book that will help her.”

It is a simple story. Told simply.

In the spirit of Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop, which I covered in my Top-10 several years ago, the arc of this novel keeps bringing back our focus on unlikely friendships and life's second chances.

Whether you are seeking a cozy escape or want to explore the literary journey of an endearing cast of characters, The Door-to-Door Bookstore is a delightful read.

2.?????? Isabel Allende. The Wind Knows My Name. Ballantine Books, 2024.

In the past, it was highly unlikely for me not to cover a book by Isabel Allende. I was introduced to her work and then to her in 1994. At that time, I had only read Paula. I went back and read everything she had written and followed her work very closely since then. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to meet with her several times; the twinkle in her eyes hasn’t changed one bit.

I was unable to connect with several of her books between 2001 and 2010—mostly because the pendulum between fiction and fantasy had swung a syllable too far. With The Japanese Lover and The Long Petal of the Sea, I found myself being drawn to her work again. I also discovered that while her flair with which I fell in love was with the stories set in Latin America, she can write with just as much poise and versatility with settings as diverse as the US, Haiti, Poland, or Japan.

Even so, I have not actively looked for her new writings in the past five years. My friend and source for all things Latin American pointed me to The Wind Knows My Name, which I would have very likely missed on my own.

This book is about the enduring pain of displacement and the resilience of the human spirit. The story spans multiple decades, geographies, and cultures and connects the experiences of Samuel Adler, Leticia Cordero, and Anita Díaz—children separated from their families by the travesties of war, the Holocaust, and immigration.

In the words of Lauren Fox from The New York Times, “Samuel Adler is a 5-year-old Jewish boy in Vienna on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht. Although his parents, Rudolph and Rachel, have felt slowly encroaching dread over the past few years—‘the stench of fear, like rust and rotting garbage’—they are not prepared for the shocking explosion of Nazi violence and destruction. These first few scenes are a vivid depiction of the moment, the hot flame of terror and chaos, followed by Rachel’s increasingly desperate attempts to save her family and her eventual realization that she must send her only child on a Kindertransport train to England…. Leticia is a child survivor like Samuel, but of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981. After her village is destroyed and most of her family is murdered, she endures a brutal border crossing with her father. ‘She remembered little from her childhood before the border crossing, just the smell of the wood-burning stove, the dense vegetation, the taste of ripe corn, the chorus of birds, warm tortillas for breakfast, her grandmother’s prayers, her brothers’ and sisters’ cries and laughter’… Finally, Allende introduces Anita Díaz, a precocious blind girl separated from her mother after being denied legal entry to the United States… The deliberate cruelty of the bureaucracies that enforce the separations, and the enduring psychic wounds these ruptures inflict on children, are the novel’s foundation and its psychological backbone.”

Allende's prose, rooted in her signature style, is rich with compassion and layered storytelling. The tale of her three main characters—apart in time but conjoined in the themes of forced migration, systemic violence, and intergenerational trauma is as incisive as it is empathetic. The novel transcends its individual stories, resonating as a collective cry for justice, dignity, and hope.

My mother was 7 and my father was 11 when their respective families had to flee what is now Pakistan to what would become their new home in India. The chaos and confusion along the way split them into multiple, smaller groups in early August of 1947. My mother and her older sister, 13, were separated from their parents. Miraculously, the family was reunited at a refugee camp in November that year, but not without loss of life and property. I grew up listening to the stories of the Partition and have a (quasi) first-hand sense for the trauma of displacement and loss.

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Back to The Wind Knows My Name, while the scope of the novel is impressive, the diversity of its arcs is both its strength and its weakness. At times, the story feels rushed, and the development of its characters feels incomplete. These imperfections notwithstanding, the novel is both timely and relevant. I am likely to read it again.

Philosophy

3.?????? Andy Clark. The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Pantheon, 2023

Right around the time I was preparing to defend my Ph.D. thesis at Columbia, Andy Clark’s book Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing became of one of the required readings for the AI track. A couple of years later, in 1993, Prof. Gil Jost at the WashU School of Medicine organized a session in St. Louis along with his colleague Jim Blaine to discuss the future of AI in medicine. I met Andy Clark at the reception that evening. He was on the faculty in Cognitive Science at WashU. Our conversation quickly wandered off into ideas on how to extend the human mind—specifically a radiologist’s mind. What if we had a neural network where each node was not a computer but rather a human. Could such a network of radiologists help make better diagnostic decisions and have a more robust self-correction mechanism?

I parked that thought away and didn’t do much with it until 2008 when I met Dr. Donald Bronn, who was implementing such a system at his company. That made me go back and read Andy Clark’s books, including The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, and Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. These books were fascinating , for the most part, because they were reinforcing a book idea on which I had been working with Ajay Bakshi and David Bodanis. [The working title is Organs, Organisms, and Organizations, but the project is on hold for now.]

All of this to bring us back to The Experience Machine. Its Table of Contents reads as follows:

Preface: Shaping Experience

1. Unboxing the Prediction Machine

2. Psychiatry and Neurology: Closing the Gap

3. Action as Self-Fulfilling Prediction

4. Predicting the Body

Interlude: The Hard Problem— Predicting the Predictors?

5. Expecting Better

6. Beyond the Naked Brain

7. Hacking the Prediction Machine

Conclusions: Ecologies of Prediction, Porous to the World

Appendix: Some Nuts and Bolts

As the reviewer from Kirkus Reviews says, “… Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, examines how our understanding of the world is fundamentally informed by cognitive forecasting. Far from being mere passive receivers of some objective reality, we are, it seems, always actively involved in imagining what reality is likely to be and constantly responding to so-called ‘prediction errors’ as we resolve differences between our expectations and incoming sense data. In this remarkable book, the author clearly and memorably sets forth the profound implications of such a theory. As Clark explains, what we take to be real—including our beliefs about who we are—is necessarily a fluid and idiosyncratic construct, and it depends on an ongoing set of negotiations between what we anticipate based on precedent and what our senses imply in the unfolding present. None of us simply records a stable set of facts from the world around us; in fact, we create a version of that world deeply informed by personal history.”

For anyone who has attended a Landmark Forum, been to a silent retreat, read No Self No Problem by Chris Neubauer, or simply worked on observing and regulating their emotional reactions, Clark’s insights would be obvious. Clark is humble enough in his writing to acknowledge that the basic concept itself goes back well over a century. Helmholtz had first suggested in the late 1800s that some unconscious reasoning process is “guiding” our optical and auditory senses. Hence the question of whether we perceive the world to be an objective reality reconstructed from what we sense or whether we, at least in part, make it up in our head has been a point of inquiry in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Clark’s work is novel, however, in his willingness to reframe some of the known problems in learning, behavioral therapy, pain management, and de-addiction (and the solutions that are known to work today, even if partially) and map them back to his model of the brain as predictive engine. Further, Clark is willing to go out on a limb and suggest that consciousness itself might well be a kind of recursive engine that makes predictions about predictions, concurrently with predictions about the sensed environment. In so doing, he is confirming that the brain, per se, does not have agency.

In summary, The Experience Machine invites us to reconsider the very notions of cognition—not as a passive mirroring of reality but as an active dance of prediction and correction. Clark's insights feel both groundbreaking and oddly familiar, resonating with ancient philosophical inquiries and contemporary self-improvement movements alike.

A one hour lecture by Andy Clark at The Royal Institution might serve as a good starting point before you commit to the book.

If the general topic of cognition as an interplay of our inner models and our external worlds is of interest, there is plenty to work with. If you want to go far back into early works, my favorite is Immanuel Kant, who proposed in Critique of Pure Reason in the 1780s that the mind actively structures experience. He argued that space, time, and causality are not features of the external world but frameworks imposed by the mind to make sense of sensory data. In the more recent category, authors like Karl Friston, Daniel Dennett, David Eagleman, Joseph LeDoux, and Jeff Hawkins are good places to start. Finally, books like No Self No Problem by Chris Neubauer or The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch do an excellent job of integrating predictive engine theories with ancient Buddhist philosophy.

History / Politics

4.?????? William Dalrymple. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Bloomsbury, 2024.

This year marked the 40th anniversary of the 1984 riots in India. The anti-Sikh violence across northern India left thousands dead and several times as many displaced. My family had to hide at a neighbor’s home for over a week. My dorm-mates in Varanasi saved me and several of my Sikh classmates from violence by moving us from room to room and to the homes of our professors so that our whereabouts would not be known to the rioting mobs. Eventually we were holed in a bunker at the Vice Chancellor’s lodge for several days and cut off from all communication. More than a week later, my parents learnt via a telegram from the university authorities that I was safe.

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I managed to block out the entire incident for a long time and avoided books and news on the subject.

Ten years later, I read William Dalrymple’s The City of Djinns, where he dedicated a chapter to 1984. The biting precision of his narrative brought me face to face with demons I thought I had buried a long time ago. I was particularly taken by his poise in injecting just enough wit and humor to keep the story moving without hiding its darkness.

I have read literally every book he has written since then. India has been home to Dalrymple and his family throughout these years. I have had the privilege of meeting him at the Jaipur Literature Festival on several occasions.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World tells the story of a 1500-year period from 250BC to 1200AD when India’s influence on the rest of the world played out through its religion, art, science, medicine, and language along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. It also presents India as an essential counterbalance to the oft-dominant narrative of the Silk Road.

Dalrymple masterfully weaves together tales from ancient inscriptions, travelers' accounts, and archaeological discoveries to illustrate India's role as a cultural and intellectual superpower. The book unfolds like a vivid tapestry, revealing how India's philosophies shaped early Buddhism in Central Asia, how its mathematics laid the foundations for modern algebra, and how its medical texts influenced practitioners as far away as Persia and Greece. Dalrymple's keen eye for detail and his ability to connect the dots between disparate worlds make The Golden Road very informative, yet effortless to read.

I do have a few points of contention with Dalrymple. I sense that his romanticism occasionally veers into over-indexing an India-centric view of historical exchanges. For instance, when he draws attention to India’s centrality in ancient trade, he overlooks the competing narratives about the influence of China and Iran, which have been richly chronicled by academics like Valerie Hansen at Yale and Mehrdad Kia at the University of Montana as well as by Christopher Beckwith at Indiana University. Similarly, his treatment of the decline of India’s cultural influence after 1200 AD is very unliterally attributed to invasions and shifts in religious dominance. For a writer as nuanced as Dalrymple, this treatment is too monochromatic.

Is this simply a careless oversight, a more systemic lack of rigor, or a subconscious nod to the growing nationalism in India? Irrespective of the answer, The Golden Road will make an essential addition to my collection.

You can also hear about the book in Dalrymple’s own words in his hour-long lecture hosted by the British Library. For something a bit more personal, his interview with James O’Brien at the LBC is truly endearing.

5.?????? James Shapiro, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War. Penguin, 2024

In Summer of 2023, the Writers Guild of America—representing over 10,000 screenwriters—went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. I called up Joel Cohen (screenwriter of Toy Story and The Inseparables) just to check in and to understand better what the rules of engagement in the “creativity industry” were like.

My conversation with Joel led me to an odd historical vignette: as a part of the New Deal, the federal government spent over $175 million on the arts between 1933 and 1943—during the Great Depression and early World War II. The Federal One agency funded the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Theater Project and hired over 10,000 artists to create paintings, murals, sculptures for government buildings, employed over 13,000 musicians and composers, and nearly 12,000 actors, playwrights, stagehands, and designers. Specifically, the Federal Theatre Project accomplished something quite extraordinary: it created a distinctly American theater with a national appeal, including a new documentary-theater form called the Living Newspaper.

My first reaction to this newfound knowledge was one of positive amazement.

I hadn’t realized that there was a whole other side to the story until I came across Smithsonian Magazine’s review of James Shapiro’s The Playbook earlier this year, “…the [Theater] project staged more than 1,000 productions in 29 states over its four-year existence. Around 30 million Americans, many of whom had never seen a play before, attended these performances, which included a production of Macbeth with an all-Black cast and an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here. Under the leadership of Vassar College professor Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theater Project created thousands of jobs at a time of mass unemployment and poverty. The program also presented a decidedly progressive vision of the nation, with Flanagan telling colleagues, ‘If, in making people laugh, which we certainly want to do, we can’t also protest … against some of the evils of this country of ours, then we do not deserve the chance put into our hands.’ Unsurprisingly, the project’s productions soon caught the attention of Martin Dies, the congressman who established the House Un-American Activities Committee… Badgering Flanagan on the stand, Dies accused the Federal Theater Project of fomenting divisions between Americans and promoting communist conspiracies. As Shapiro writes in his timely, engrossing account of a moment with stark parallels to the present, Dies’ efforts—which culminated in the dissolution of the project in 1939—emphasized strategies [that] coalesced into a right-wing playbook, widely used today, for securing power and challenging progressive initiatives.”

The chapters of The Playbook are titled: Is Marlowe a communist; The creation of the Federal Theater; Macbeth: The first hit; It can't happen here: going national; How long, brethren?; Radical dance; One third of a nation: riling Congress; Liberty deferred: Confronting racism; The creation of the Dies Committee; The Dies Committee v. the Federal Theater; The end of the Federal Theater; Epilogue.

The interplay between democracy and theater is a well-researched phenomenon. I heard Adam Leipzig (Dead Poets Society, March of the Penguins) speak at an event UC Berkeley in late 2010. The topic of his talk was How Theater Invented Democracy. He explained how Pisistratus created an annual theatre festival where all theatre activity came together at a single place, allowing the four competing tribes to share a common experience. This helped change Athenian consciousness – leading to foundation of democracy a few decades later around 500 BC. Over the next 100 years, both theater and democracy flourished. Conversely, towards the end of this period, as theater’s freedom on critiquing societal and political malaise felt stifled, so did democracy. By 400 BC, the Athenian era of free-expression democracy was all but gone. The crucible had crumbled.

The Playbook accomplishes a conjoined objective of educating us on the historical relevance of the arts in democracy, as well as the culture wars it engendered, and through that lens, reminds us of the perils to present-day governance and fragility of the institution of free expression.

You have seen my coverage of James Shapiro’s work in my book reviews in the past (2020, Shakespeare in a Divided America). He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. ?

Management / Economics

6.?????? Cal Newport. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Portfolio, 2024.

When it comes to books on management or leadership, my response with most of them is quite predictable. I start reading with enthusiasm, I get frustrated a few chapters in because the treatment is repetitive, long, or replete with irrelevant references. Very often, the first-principles thinking is missing, and there is an overreliance on templates.? I am not suggesting that they are not useful. I am only expressing my impatience with them.

I am also not suggesting that I have not come across management books that evoke critical thinking or teach new, robust fundamentals. I have.

Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout is unfortunately in the first category. Repetitive and often obvious.

Nevertheless, I have chosen to include it. Perhaps because simple tools such as staring at some scribbles on my whiteboard or going for a long walk by myself or with a colleague, that I learnt in my early days in executive roles—things that I consider essential in the leadership toolchest—do need to be revisited and spelled out. Also, they need to be practiced deliberately.

Much too often, I hear from my younger colleagues about their frustration with performance metrics and their burnout. The conversation is not specifically about work-life balance. They are not complaining about the hours they work. Rather, their disappointment is with the fact that their operating environments are over-indexed on metrics devoid of common-sense and basic critical thinking. They often feel shamed into “keeping up” with rhetoric like “…we are a high-performance startup.”

Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity gets to the heart of these issues. His message, although repetitive, is simple and prescriptive enough to be useful.

Who is this message for? I believe that until those who inflict productivity-obsession fully internalize the basics, it will be difficult to bring about a course correction. I realize that I am coming across rather harshly. I have personally been very fortunate to work early in my career for people who simply got it. While excellence is achieved as a team, the culture for excellence must be set top-down.

7.?????? Angus Deaton. Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. Princeton University Press, 2023

In late March of 2019, I was in Atlanta to attend the AACR Board of Trustees meeting. Inequity in access to healthcare was one of the central topics of discussion. Later that evening, the conversation at the reception morphed into economic inequity more generally. One of my fellow trustees pointed us to a testimony that Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute had given before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee just a few days earlier: “Real wages have stagnated since 1980 while productivity has more than doubled. The top 10% of US families now own 76% of wealth. The bottom 50% own just 1%... Labor market income represents the largest source of income for most Americans and that is why we cannot tackle income inequality without tackling wage growth.”

Deaton’s collection of essays in Economics in America is mostly about inequity in America.

In his own words, “For most of my working life, economics has been technical, largely concerned with the promotion of economic efficiency to the exclusion of other important social aims. This is in sharp contrast to the founders of the discipline, like Adam Smith, who was deeply concerned with social issues, ethics, and philosophy. Even as recently as 1926, John Maynard Keynes said that economics needed to reconcile three things — efficiency, social justice, and liberty. I believe that we have lost our concern with trying to balance these three things in policy, and that not doing so is at least in part responsible for the social and economic dysfunctions we see today.”

Much has been written and said about this subject over the past decade, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality, and Anthony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? Further, topics like economic inequality and systemic failures in access to healthcare have increasingly permeated American public consciousness. They are no longer confined to academic or policy circles but have become central to political debates, cultural narratives, and grassroots movements.

Why then, do I include Deaton’s book in my review? My reasons mostly stem from tribal affinity: personal familiarity with the author and some knowledge of his work in health economics.

(You might recall that I covered Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton in my 2020 book review. Sir Angus Deaton is the 2015 Nobel Laureate in Economics. He is married to Anne Case, whom I got to know during my time at Princeton through our mutual colleague Uwe Reinhardt. I last met Anne and Angus in the Summer of 2018 at the Princeton Conference of the Council on Health Care Economics and Policy.)

(Fortunately), while the chapters are unified by overarching themes such as inequality, health care, and the role of economics in public life, they are not tightly integrated into a single linear narrative. Instead, each chapter can mostly stand on its own. The titles should give you a sense of what to expect: Beginning – fast food restaurants, gangsters, and the minimum wage; Adventures in American healthcare; Poverty at home and poverty abroad; The politics of numbers: fixing the price? Material inequality; Inequalities beyond money; Retirement, pensions, and the stock market; Economists at work; Nobel prizes and Nobel Laureates; Did economists break the economy? Finale: Is economic failure a failure of economics?

I found Deaton’s musings as an immigrant particularly endearing… and relatable: “I think Americans are learning that there’s more than one way of thinking about the world. One of the things I’ve been arguing is that all of us, including me, were a little too ready to accept the arguments that markets can solve things. We should have known.”

You can start literally with any chapter and work your way around through the book. Alternatively, you can start with the author’s interview at the Philadelphia Free Library—lucid and very personal.

Science

8.?????? Kristian R?nn. The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future). Crown Currency, 2024

In the middle of the pandemic in 2021, I ran into an unexpected objection from an investor in one of my portfolio companies: the use of plastic in our Covid testing platform. While we didn’t have an immediate fix for the issue, the conversation got me thinking more generally about the long-term environmental impact of what we do. I turned to one of my trusted resources on the topic: Krish Krishnan in Washington, DC. Krish is the founder and CEO of Zasti, a platform for baselining carbon footprints. Our conversation gave me several pointers, one of which led me to Kristian R?nn in Stockholm. He was (is) the founder of Normative, focused on transparency of carbon emissions. I got connected to him via my colleagues at Karolinska Institute and started following his work.

That being the context, The Darwinian Trap was a pleasant surprise.

The book offers an evolutionary lens through which to view humanity's struggle with short-term thinking. The book's central argument is that many of our modern challenges—environmental crises, inequality, and the proliferation of misinformation—can be traced back to evolutionary instincts that once ensured our survival but now leave us vulnerable in a world vastly different from the one in which they developed.

R?nn refers to these instincts as "Darwinian demons"—forces that prioritize immediate success, survival, and reproduction at the expense of long-term consequences. For example, behaviors like hoarding resources might have been advantageous in our ancestral past but now manifest as exploitation in a globalized, interconnected society. This mismatch between our evolutionary wiring and contemporary realities is at the heart of what R?nn describes as the Darwinian trap.

Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology, R?nn illustrates how these instincts pervade not just individual behaviors but also institutional and systemic dynamics. Quarterly performance optimization, political short-sightedness, and environmental negligence are, in his view, modern expressions of these ancient survival strategies. While R?nn paints a stark picture of the risks posed by our evolutionary baggage, he invites reflection on how we can design policies, institutions, and personal behaviors that transcend our short-term impulses and align with the needs of a sustainable future.

R?nn’s central idea, per se, is not novel. There is substantial evidence in neuroscience to suggest that our tendency toward short-term thinking is rooted in our evolutionary makeup. For instance, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how our "System 1" thinking (fast, instinctive) often overpowers "System 2" (slow, deliberate). Early humans lived in environments in which securing food, avoiding predators, and reproducing were critical to survival while long-term planning often held less relevance. This led to the development of "present bias," where immediate needs outweigh future considerations. Similarly, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have written extensively about how humans evolved cognitive mechanisms suited for immediate survival, even if maladaptive in modern settings. Also, works by scientists Kent Berridge and Wolfram Schultz focus on the "reward prediction error" system, which ensures that we seek out activities with immediate benefits, such as eating or social bonding.? The disconnect between this wiring and sustainability is explored at length in E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth.

Why then, do I feel compelled to include The Darwinian Trap in this review? The reason lies in R?nn’s optimism and in the possibility of learning from indigenous societies who often manage to overcome short-term thinking by embedding long-term perspectives into their cultural, social, and spiritual practices. These strategies are not accidental but are systems of thought and behavior that prioritize sustainability, intergenerational equity, and harmony with the environment. They build upon an intuitive understanding that complex societies require foresight, cooperation, and delayed gratification, which are supported by the brain's prefrontal cortex. This suggests that while we may have a default inclination toward short-term thinking, it is not deterministic.

If you are inclined to read the book, you might consider starting with this interview at the Foresight Institute. Be assured that the audio quality and the number of views is not reflective of the robustness of the content. And once you have read the book, the following resources that draw upon the ancient wisdom of sustainability might also be relevant to you: Sacred Ecology by Fikret Berkes, The Woven Universe by Maori Marsden, and Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom.

9.?????? Nick Lane.? The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. W. W. Norton and Company, 2016.

Several years ago, my friend and colleague Bikash Sabata introduced me to? Karl Friston’s model of Free Energy Principle, the most “gentle” description of? which can be found here. Bikash and I were on one of our afternoon walks earlier this year, discussing Friston’s 2022 book Active Inference. About an hour into the conversation, both of us were of the view that this model of the human brain and cognition made the most sense of everything that we had read on the subject.? Why, then, hasn’t it been applied to update the antiquated approaches in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy? Friston is a psychiatrist, after all.

We had to table that question for later because Bikash managed to send me down another thread of reflection on the role of (free?) energy in the emergence of complexity in the first place—at cellular level, and then in creating higher forms of life. He recommended that I read The Vital Question by Nick Lane.

The question that Lane tackles is not new: how did life transition from simple, single-celled organisms to (more) complex multicellular life??

Lane situates his exploration at the intersection of biochemistry, evolution, and philosophy, challenging the conventional wisdom that views genetic mutations as the primary driver of evolution. Instead, he argues that the energy constraints of cellular processes hold the key to understanding life’s leaps in complexity. These processes are “upstream” of genetic mutations. This perspective offers not just an alternative explanation but an invitation to rethink the very Truth of life’s trajectory: Was the emergence of complexity inevitable or a cosmic aberration? Lane offers a very cogent and accessible synthesis, connecting the dots between energy cycles, cell biology, and evolutionary history.

The following Table of Contents gives you an idea of what to expect in the book.

Part I: The Problem

Chapter 1: What is life?

Chapter 2: What is living?

Part II: The Origin of Life

Chapter 3: Energy at life's origin

Chapter 4: The emergence of cells

Part III: Complexity

Chapter 5: The origin of complex cells

Chapter 6: Sex and the origins of death

Part IV: Predictions

Chapter 7: The power and the glory

His exploration begins with the origin of life itself, asking why life emerged as it did. Lane contends that the highly specialized environment of alkaline hydrothermal vents provided the perfect crucible for the first self-replicating cells. Specifically, Lane argues that the primal trigger happened when the proton gradients in the hydrothermal vents led to the evolution of metabolism. In other words, metabolism came first, and everything else that we consider central to life—DNA, RNA, proteins, transcription, and translation—happened downstream. From there, he dives into the evolution of eukaryotes, detailing how another singular event—the engulfing of one cell by another to form a symbiotic relationship—laid the foundation for emergence of complexity leading to higher forms of life. The “acquisition” of mitochondria that resulted from the symbiosis allowed energy production to be distributed throughout the cell volume, leading to more energy per gene, leading to an unprecedented expansion of eukaryotic genomes, ultimately leading to the diversity of complex life forms that we see today.

The distinction of Lane’s work lies in its breadth and grandeur of interdisciplinary connections. He moves effortlessly across fields, making ambitious claims with clarity and precision and with much humility, giving ample credit to others where it is deserved

In the spirit of Monod’s Chance and Necessity or Schr?dinger’s What Is Life, Lane dares to confront the larger questions of biology. If your preferred medium is audio, you will find the key ideas of the book in this episode of Big Biology Podcast.

If you find yourself drawn to the author’s ideas, his more recent book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death will find its way to your bookshelf as well. Nick Lane serves on the faculty in Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London.

As for that incomplete thread on psychoanalysis from where I wandered off to Nick Lane, I have not lost sight of that. Jeremy Holmes’s paper Friston's free energy principle: new life for psychoanalysis? gives us a good starting point for continuing that conversation.

Mathematics

10???? Tom Chivers. Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World. Atria, 2024

People in my extended circle frequently reach out to me when they have a medical issue, especially if it pertains to cancer. Their ask is usually one of the following: help in connecting with the right specialist in the field, help with a second opinion, and help in understanding their test results or prognosis.

The first two tasks are relatively easy.

It is the third where I find myself struggling. What does it mean when a cancer patient hears something to the effect, “…. the five-year survival for a patient with such and such treatment is seventy eight percent”? Often, the question that presents itself is a much more personal “Will I make it to my daughter’s wedding?” Over the years, I have learnt to not start with, “It depends.” Instead, I have realized that starting with a couple of anecdotes and then explaining the statistical methods used in clinical trials lands better. It gives them a stronger feeling of agency.

Bayes’ theorem is an all-pervasive statistical model that has found its applicability in areas as diverse as analysis of clinical studies, design of spam filters, artificial intelligence, and law, to name a few. The basic method of Bayesian reasoning is as follows: it quantitatively generates and refines an estimate by iteratively updating a prior belief (which initially might be intuitive or subjective) with new measurement. The process is repeated with the refined belief serving as the new prior each time.

The underlying concept of this theorem was developed by Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister in the UK, and published posthumously in 1763. The method was independently discovered and refined by Pierre-Simon Laplace a decade later.

Tom Chivers’ book Everything is Predicable is about Bayes’ theorem and gives a vivacious, witty account of a generally dense subject in the following chapters:

Introduction A Theory of Not Quite Everything

Chapter 1. From The Book of Common Prayer to the Full Monte Carlo

Chapter 2. Bayes in Science

Chapter 3. Bayesian Decision Theory

Chapter 4. Bayes in the World

Chapter 5. The Bayesian Brain

Conclusion Bayesian Life

If you found The Experience Machine earlier in this review intriguing, Chapter 5 will be of particular interest to you. In the author’s own words, “… we like to think that there is an objective truth out there, and the Bayesian model of perception is explicitly subjective. A probability estimate isn’t some fact about the world, but my best guess of the world, given the information I have.”

“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” goes a quote popularized by Mark Twain. I’m sure Bayes would have a bone to pick with Twain. After all, statistics is also a means to arrive at a reasonable estimate of truth—even if not the Truth.?

Nicht Wahr?

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